Unofficial news and tips about Google

July 9, 2009

Google Translates Documents

Google Translate added the option to upload the documents you want to translate. Until now, you could copy the text in Google Translate or publish the document online and paste its address.

Unfortunately, Google converts your documents to HTML and then it translates the HTML file, so the translation doesn't preserve the layout or the embedded images. You can upload Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, PDF files, HTML and text files.

Tamil is spoken by 66 million people worldwide. India, Sri Lanka and Singapore, where it has an official status; with significant minorities in Canada, Malaysia, Mauritius, and Réunion. Certainly Singapore translates all the official documents to Chinese, Malay and Tamil. They should have the parallel corpus for Tamil. Please include Tamil as one of the languages for translation.

I suspect integration with Google Docs isn't far away. At first just a "Translate this" link opening an HTML view in a new tab, then maybe translation of selected text on demand, being a "viewer" of a doc in another language, etc. I guess the Holy Grail might be transparent, on-the-fly translation, such that collaborators on a doc might not even have to speak a common language. (Heh... at what point is life made too easy? :-p )